Good Wives by Margaret Forster

Author:Margaret Forster
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446443736
Publisher: Random House

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AS SOON AS she got back to Samoa, Fanny had to start working harder than she had done in her whole life, apart from her Reese River days (when she had been young, strong and healthy). By the summer of 1890, she was fifty years of age and for the previous decade had been plagued by a variety of ailments which made her physically much weaker and mentally not nearly as resolute and steady. Her husband needed to be looked after with ever-increasing care and she could not look to him for the kind of practical help she needed. Finding help was one of her major problems. Previously, in the houses they’d rented throughout their married life, she had had to find household maids, but maids were not top priority at Vailima. What was called for was a good deal of brute strength to put the estate into proper shape. She needed labourers to work under her supervision in the garden and to finish the interior of the house. She didn’t speak any Samoan and with her famous inability (and unwillingness) to learn foreign languages she was not likely to pick it up easily.

And yet this exhausting period had its satisfactions and pleasures. She and Louis lived in the temporary wooden cottage, which Moors had erected. It had only two rooms, but Fanny’s home-making instincts soon had them looking attractive, the walls hung with ‘tapa’ (the local cloth made from bark and decorated with patterns), the floors covered with woven straw mats, the windows hung with pink and maroon cotton curtains which she’d quickly run up and Louis’s books carefully arranged on six shelves. It was cosy and colourful, and both of them enjoyed the intimacy of their quarters. But Fanny wasn’t in the cottage much – she was out from dawn to dusk struggling to make a garden out of the cleared area of bush. She had grand ideas of making it not simply beautiful, full of all the flowers and shrubs she could persuade to grow, but also valuable, producing all the fruit and vegetables they would need to live on. Louis admired her efforts tremendously; writing to friends, he described how ‘rain or shine, a little blue indefatigable figure is to be observed howking about certain patches of the garden. She comes in heated and bemired up to the eyebrows.’1 But slowly, she made progress, directing her Samoan helpers with emphatic gestures to make them do what she wanted and to plant everything the right way up. Almost every plant she tried flourished, and flourished rapidly. The pigs were harder. She was determined to keep pigs (as well as hens) much to Louis’s amusement. He wrote that she fought endless battles with her ‘wild swine’ and would not let the big black sow outwit her.

Naturally, all this outdoor work, a lot of it heavy, tired her, but to Louis she seemed finally in her element. She was, he teased her, a peasant through and through – he

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